YouTube gets site-wide auto-captioning

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YouTube has announced that it's rolling out auto-captioning across its entire whole website. The feature uses speech detection algorithms to enable a computer to transcribe the content of videos into text - useful for those with hearing impairment.

It works very well with some videos, but kinda terribly on others. The main factors behind the quality of the transcription is how much background noise there is, and whether or not the voice is muffled. Once auto-captioned, however, the video owner can choose to edit them to improve the transcription or replace them entirely.

At the moment, the feature only works for videos where English is spoken, and there's a "request processing" button to get your videos indexed quicker. Once captioned, you can also auto-translate the captions into other languages. Google says about the feature:

"Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater collaboration and understanding".